T h a t “ tired feeling” is the earmark of this stomach- ulcer, aspirin age. Everybody needs a rest. Some try to take a vacation, and when they return home they need a month to get over the vacation. There is quite a fad for reading best-sellers on peace of mind, peace of heart, peace of soul. Books on how to relax, how to “ let go,” or how to go to sleep take first place in libraries and display windows. One wonders whether we have not overdone the matter until we are a little lopsided — though still not rested. God has made us for alternate periods of effort and repose. Some saints major on effort and some on repose, and in either case the result is an imbalanced testimony. Doubtless in this feverish age we need to make much of peace with God and peace of God, the peace which the world cannot give. We thank God for the rest He provides here and hereafter for His people. We must come apart and rest awhile and be still and know that He is God. Our Saviour invites the weary and heavy-laden to His rest, and never were men more in need of it. But rest and repose are only one half of Christian experience. We need a sanctified tension. Nobody ever amounted to much who was not keyed-up about some thing. The relaxed fiddle-string makes poor music. Our Lord was said to be beside Himself, and the believers on Pentecost were thought to be drunk with new wine. Paul impresses nobody as a glorified vacationist. We have need of a sanctified tension; we need to be lceyed-up by the Spirit to do the works of God. Most of us are wound up in the flesh, fit to explode with repressed worries and doubts and fears. Or again, we strain and strive with human might and main and mistake nervous energy for the fullness of the Spirit. When the Word exhorts us not to be drunk with wine but to be filled with the Spirit we are presented with God’s stimulant for His people. We need to be excited and stirred and zealous and intense to get anything done for God. No one thinks of Wesley or Whitefield or Finney
or Moody always worrying about not getting enough rest. They were keyed-up for the Lord but they were also keyed-up by the Lord, which accounts for both the quality and quantity of work they accomplished. Some of the saints today seriously need a holy tension. They get tense, all right, arguing their pet doctrines and grumbling over their pet peeves. But they need to exchange their worries for God’s burden and get wrought up over something worth the excitement. Too many believers, sound enough doctrinally, haunt Bible conferences, read books galore and listen to their favorite preachers; but they have moved in a spiritual stupor for years. They need to be shocked into realizing that they are saving their lives only to lose them, living in sheltered comfort, feathering their own nests instead of spending and being spent for others. We could declare a moratorium on the relaxation angle and profitably major on getting keyed-up for God. A Christian leader has said, “ I’d rather try to tone down a fanatic than to wake up a corpse,” and we can bear better with a brother too excited than with a flock of drones. Of course we need not go to either extreme. But one has only to move among thousands of church members piddling around with a lot of little meetings and suppers and dry study courses to realize how pitifully much they need to get really on fire for the genuine issues of the gospel. They wear themselves out with a round of worth less little religious chores and are too exhausted to rise to do real business for God. I have just read that Dr. F.B. Meyer at eighty made his final preaching tour of America preaching thousands of sermons on a fifteen thousand mile trip. He had peace within, a mind at leisure from itself and was owned and operated by the Holy Spirit to pour himself out to ripe old age in loving service. Of course we have different capacities and must work within certain limitations, but we need to learn that the rest our Saviour gives is not the rest of slothfulness but inner rest that makes us fit for outward service. END
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THE KING'S BUSINESS
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